Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Alex Scales, Bellarmine '18, led the Bells to the 42nd Annual Cyrstal Springs Invitational Championship Boys Varsity race team championship by taking the individual title with a new personal record of 15:18. You can check out my interview with Alex at this LINK.

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

As always, very informative interview. Reading Alex's comments about his team and coach is a great reminder that XC is a team sport, not only on race day, but also during those countless miles and hours on the road. I would like to hear more from everyone on the seemingly big jump in performance of elite boys from Soph to Junior year. Why does this happen: more work, size of muscles, race ability, etc...? And why does that not happen on the girls' side.

I think physical maturity a major factor. Just compare the average freshmen and senior boys. They all hit at different times. YMMV. I also think a sub16 fresh/soph boy will stay further under the radar when the top varsity guys are sub15.

I don't know enough about girl racers. Do they add muscles too or just curvy stuff that doesn't help their racing?

Boys and girls mature at different ages. It's much more common for a freshman girl to have a large impact on her cross country team because girls mature earlier than boys (physically and mentally). Boys continue to mature and grow throughout high school so as long as the work progresses at a smart rate, boys could potentially show improvement throughout their high school careers and beyond. I think the changes for a girl throughout high school are very much individual. There has to be a plan in place and just like the boys, the progression has to be gradual and not with big gains in training over a short amount of time.

Fantastic interview. Alex is a quality young man and makes everyone in the sport better. I love how he continued to find ways to share his success and focused on trying to race faster while hoping the competition did so as well. What a true champion, well done.

Within the span of high school, most boys mature physically (and, on rare occasion; mentally :p) into young men. Most girls have actually undergone most or all of this process. This actually makes it more difficult to build muscle mass in most male UNDERCLASSMEN high school athletes (as they are most likely still growing taller). Thus, many junior and senior boys who have remained dedicated to their athletic development will find themselves able to handle a greater workload than in the past (which if implemented correctly will result in a jump in performance). Girls can usually handle such a workload right away and will therefore usually make these large improvements earlier in their career.

This is why you tend to see more frequent "breakout" performances/athletes/seasons on the boys side of things and occurrences such as Foot Locker finals which feature 3 defending champions in the same race on the girls side.